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Comment by ilikehurdles | Hacker News Reader

Those vintage macbook pros are still getting OS and software updates. Hardly "software-defined garbage". I have a 2012 retina that's still chugging along perfectly. Battery life is down from when I bought it, sure, but there's still enough juice for a few hours of unplugged work.

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Macbook Pros cost far more than Chromebooks. MBPs are 4x to 10x the price. They shouldn't be compared apples to apples.

Getting downvoted here, would love to know why.

I did not downvote you nor do I know why you are downvoted and I do understand your frustration.

That said, it is against the Hacker News guidelines to comment about voting/down-voting and generally only results in further down-votes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

People don't like puns?

Because your post was utterly irrelevant in every possible way. A lot of things a lot more expensive than Macs get EOL on a much more regular basis.

Have fun running brand new Android on a seven year old tablet.

The 2012 retina was released mid-2012, and the 7 year rule starts when it was last produced. So it hasn't reached obsolete/vintage status yet.

(I used the same MacBook, replaced the battery a couple of months ago, and have no plans to replace it anytime soon.)

I use a mid 2009 Core 2 Duo. I replaced the battery on it ~6 months ago. I also installed Mojave on it, and with the exception of a weird quirk where apps that do not live in the Dock do not disappear from it when you close the app, it runs fine.

It is essentially a Hackintosh, albeit a legal one, as the hardware is Apple hardware.

I do dev work on it, though it is ruby and/or javascript, not a lot of true compiling happening. But it works well.

I'd love it to be officially supported, but I mean you have to draw the line somewhere.

Edit: I forgot to mention the SSD I put in it, or the RAM I maxed out. (I did the upgrade work, I was not about to pay the premium for Apple to do it.)

What did you need to do to make Mojave compatible? I've seen a few installer patches around[0] but wasn't sure if you rolled your own solution. Thanks.

Edit: added link

[0] https://github.com/rmc-team/macos-patcher

http://dosdude1.com/mojave/, maybe?

This is the one I used.

> I also installed Mojave on it, and with the exception of a weird quirk where apps that do not live in the Dock do not disappear from it when you close the app, it runs fine.

If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, this is a feature and you can turn it off by disabling “Recent Apps” in System Preferences.

Thanks for this, I will check that out.

> I replaced the battery on it ~6 months ago.

Where did you purchase the battery from, and how is the performance, if you do not mind me asking?

I also use a mid 2009 Core 2 duo, but lately I have struggled to find a source for a battery that will last more that 1.5 hours in typical usage. I assume the issue is that any authentic Apple battery must have been manufactured so long ago that its capacity is severely degraded after having been stored (at non-ideal temperature) for so long, and it seems like even many third party batteries available are old and had inferior capacity to begin with.

I assumed the same.

I bought the battery from iFixit[1], and I am back to the original of 4ish-5ish hours.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody...

I have a 2009 Mac Pro that can no longer be updated because they dropped support for a ton of NVIDIA cards in Mojave.

End of Life does not mean it no longer works.

Also, you are still within your 7 years :)

Not receiving security updates on a modern computer intended to be connected to the internet effectively means it stops being useful/reliable.

I have a 2011 non-retina that's chugging along pretty well, the battery life is good enough to stream a 3 1/2 hour NFL game without a charge. Haven't upgraded the os since 10.12, but it still works well enough.

That's impressive, I can't say the same thing about my 2013 retina.

It wasn't until the last ~6 months that I noticed a drop-off in battery performance. Not sure if it was from streaming football/hockey games or my tendency to throw it into sleep mode thinking "I'll have time later tonight" while keeping my server/db/container processes still running.

The Chromebook updates are not the same as the updates you get from Apple. Chrome gets security updates every 2-3 weeks and full OS updates around every 6 weeks. Apple's OS is updated much less frequently.

macOS gets updates every 4-6 weeks.

My 2012 iMac was not supported by the osx release last year.

Did Apple lock down your iMac preventing you from installing/booting updated versions of Windows or Linux?

The newer Macs with T2 chips do prevent you from installing Linux, actually.

There appears to be some debate online as to whether turning off secure boot on T2 Macs allows Linux to work. It should, but there are some reports online that it does not, at least if you want to use the computer's internal storage. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/a4thsc/the_actual_fu....

I would have expected this to be sorted out by now, but that doesn't appear to be the case. If anyone knows more, please share...

Do you have a 2011 iMac? The 2012 iMacs do support last year’s macOS, Mojave.

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